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The American Prospect - articles by authorenAmerican Anointedhttp://prospect.org/article/american-anointed
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<span class="dropcap">I</span>n the best of times, it is not easy to explain the<br />
complexities of the Middle East and how the United States has related to it over<br />
the past century. Most Americans are oblivious to their country's massive impact<br />
on the world and on the Middle East in particular. It is even harder after the<br />
trauma of September 11 to explain that for decades the United States itself<br />
helped to foster some of the radical-extremist Islamic tendencies that gave rise<br />
to the horrific attacks on U.S. cities.</p>
<p>
American media self-censorship has ensured a traditional blackout<br />
on certain types of news about the Middle East (for instance, reportage, common<br />
in the Israeli or European press, on Israeli human-rights violations in the<br />
occupied territories). Nevertheless, it is a fact that many of the leaders of the<br />
groups that most likely carried out these attacks were once welcome allies of the<br />
United States. This is true whether they once belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood<br />
or one of its offshoots, adhered to extreme versions of Saudi Wahhabi doctrine,<br />
or joined the Afghan mujahideen during the war against the Soviet occupation.<br />
They, or their intellectual forebears and spiritual guides, were for decades<br />
ardent foot soldiers of the United States against enemies that included Arab<br />
nationalism, Nasserism, local communist parties, radical regimes, secular<br />
Palestinian nationalism, and the Soviets in Afghanistan. </p>
<p>
To the discomfort of American policy makers as well as critics of American<br />
policy, these radical extremists espouse--whether genuinely or out of<br />
opportunism--causes that are popular throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, as<br />
well as unpopular radical-Islamic nostrums for the ills of Middle Eastern<br />
societies.</p>
<p>
The popular causes include Palestinian self-determination, an end to the<br />
sanctions imposed on Iraq since the Gulf War, the removal of American bases from<br />
Saudi Arabia, and opposition to autocratic, corrupt regimes that dominate most<br />
countries of the region. This is problematic for policy makers who claim that the<br />
United States acts in the name of freedom, for if the freely expressed views of<br />
people in these countries were known, most would very likely be opposed to U.S.<br />
policy on all of these issues.</p>
<p>
It is equally disconcerting for longtime critics of these American policies to<br />
hear Osama bin Laden invoking these arguments. The last thing they want, after<br />
years of being ostracized for criticizing Washington's actions, is to be<br />
identified, even indirectly, with the people who killed thousands of innocent<br />
Americans. Their task, already supremely difficult in a country unfamiliar with<br />
the Middle East and consistently favorable to Israeli perspectives on the region,<br />
has suddenly become even harder.</p>
<p>
And yet, there exists a deep connection between current events and historical<br />
ones that on the surface may seem academic. It lies in long-standing Western<br />
policies in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East that favored domestically<br />
easy, politically convenient conclusions about what was just and in keeping with<br />
the principles of self-determination and international law. For long before there<br />
was an American position on the Palestine question--a policy driven primarily by<br />
political concerns in the United States--there was a British position, similarly<br />
driven by concerns external to Palestine. And facing both countries was a<br />
Palestinian leadership that seemed to grasp only dimly, if at all, the strategic<br />
challenge before it, the actual balance of forces confronting it, and the nature<br />
of the relationship between the great power of the day and its Zionist allies.</p>
<p>
While Britain and the international community solemnly committed themselves to<br />
self-determination for the Jewish people in the 1920s and 1930s, there was no<br />
such commitment to the Palestinian people, in spite of the Palestinians' unified<br />
insistence on their national rights and on Britain's obligation to keep its World<br />
War I promises of independence to the Arabs. Only after a bloody, three-year<br />
Palestinian revolt and with war looming in 1939 did the British grudgingly grant<br />
this principle, although World War II and the Holocaust intervened to render<br />
their promise meaningless.</p>
<p>
Similarly, the United States, the first country to recognize the independence<br />
of Israel, has yet to support the independence of Arab Palestine. Ironically,<br />
with another kind of world war about to engulf us, President George W. Bush<br />
finally announced that this had "always" been an American objective; in fact, the<br />
idea was only recently broached for the first time, by his immediate predecessor,<br />
Bill Clinton. </p>
<p>
If the hypocrisy in the United States upholding Israel's independence while<br />
denying that of Palestine is lost on most Americans, it is generally seen as<br />
manifest, inexplicable, and reprehensible in the rest of the world. Until it<br />
needed international support, however, a unilateralist United States could afford<br />
to ignore the nagging of Europe, Russia, China, and Arabs and Muslims on this and<br />
other issues. Today, suddenly, it appears to be paying attention.</p>
<p>
Past and present are linked as well in the ways that Western powers<br />
contributed to the genesis of political Islam in the interwar period and again in<br />
recent decades. Thus, in Palestine, the British from the outset fostered the<br />
creation of Islamic institutions headed by the mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni, even<br />
while denying legitimacy to Palestinian national bodies and preventing the<br />
establishment of representative political institutions. The British gave these<br />
newly invented Islamic institutions broad patronage power and full control of<br />
extensive revenues. For nearly two decades, until the 1936 revolt, this policy<br />
served to distract much of the Palestinian elite from a unified focus on<br />
anticolonial national objectives.</p>
<p>
A clear parallel to this British policy can be seen in that of the United<br />
States: To counterbalance radical anti-American forces (and with support from its<br />
allies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Anwar Sadat's Egypt), America fostered the<br />
Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic formations even as they stifled democracy in<br />
the Arab world. For two decades after the occupation of the West Bank and the<br />
Gaza Strip, Israel similarly used the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza as a<br />
counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organization, encouraging Brotherhood<br />
thugs to intimidate PLO supporters and even busing them across Israel from Gaza<br />
to the West Bank for that purpose. Thereafter, the Muslim Brotherhood sent young<br />
Palestinians off to Afghanistan to resist the Soviet invasion in 1979, rather<br />
than the Israeli occupation, arguing that this was the path of "true" jihad.<br />
Needless to say, Israel welcomed this development.</p>
<p>
As happens in politics, these alliances shifted. In the end, the mufti became<br />
a fierce opponent of the British, while the Muslim Brotherhood and related<br />
Islamist offshoots spawned profoundly anti-Western and anti-Israeli groups like<br />
bin Laden's al-Qaeda, Hamas, and others in Egypt, Algeria, and elsewhere.</p>
<p>
Political Islam frequently served as a potent vehicle for resistance to<br />
colonialism and external control. In Palestine the death of the charismatic<br />
preacher Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam in 1935 at the hands of the British inspired<br />
the revolt of 1936 to 1939, while more recently the Islamic Jihad Movement,<br />
disgusted by the Muslim Brotherhood's passivity toward the Israeli occupation,<br />
attacked Israeli troops, sparking the intifada that broke out in December 1987.</p>
<p>
In yet another ironic twist in the obscure early part of this strange story,<br />
the man described by the young Osama bin Laden as his "guide" in the early 1980s<br />
was the charismatic Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam, who played a key role in<br />
the flow of young men from Gaza and the West Bank to the battlefields of<br />
Afghanistan. Azzam was one of the leading advocates of developing a new kind of<br />
political tool: a radical form of Islam with roots in the approach of the Muslim<br />
Brotherhood and militant Wahhabi ideas. This approach was first employed against<br />
the Red Army in Afghanistan--in a campaign blessed, armed, trained, and financed<br />
by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Directorate for Pakistani Inter-Services<br />
Intelligence (ISI), and Saudi intelligence under Prince Turki al-Faisal. Bin<br />
Laden was central in arranging the clandestine financing of this campaign.</p>
<p>
Today we know the middle of this story, even if none of us can yet foresee the<br />
end: The CIA is now busy hunting its erstwhile Afghan and Arab allies; the ISI is<br />
currently switching sides and turning on the Taliban regime it installed in Kabul<br />
six years ago; and just before September 11, Prince Turki was abruptly removed<br />
from his post after many years of service. But the beginning of the story is<br />
still being obscured by an official and media discourse that excoriates Saudi<br />
Arabia for its support of the likes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, while<br />
passing in silence over the United States' erstwhile encouragement of bin Laden<br />
and others like him, and its complaisance toward the installation by Pakistan and<br />
Saudi Arabia of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>
Islam, of course, was a political vehicle of immense power (and had built one<br />
of the greatest civilizations the world has known) centuries before Western<br />
Europe climbed out of the Dark Ages, and Wahhabism was a potent political force<br />
before the U.S. Constitution was adopted. But it is ridiculous to claim that the<br />
forms that extreme Islamic radicalism took in recent years were shaped only by<br />
the Islamic heritage and the narrow vision of Islam propagated in the eighteenth<br />
century and afterward by Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab or other homegrown purveyors of a<br />
radical new interpretation of Islam. The truth is that these forms were also<br />
profoundly shaped by the policies of the United States and its closest allies in<br />
the Middle East and South Asia in the last decades of the Cold War.</p>
<p>
And if there is disillusionment, anger, even hatred for the United States in<br />
many countries in these regions, it is not necessary to look at Islamic doctrine,<br />
at the alleged propensity of Muslims for violence, or at the supposed centrality<br />
of the concept of jihad to Islam for the causes. One need look no further than<br />
the corrupt and autocratic regimes propped up by the United States, and its<br />
disregard for the opinions of Middle Eastern peoples regarding Palestine,<br />
sanctions on Iraq, and other issues.</p>
<p> </p></div></div></div>Tue, 30 Oct 2001 00:52:49 +0000142291 at http://prospect.orgRashid Khalidi